This paper discusses the significance of gender studies in organization and consider important directions of future studies through reviewing the previous works. The paper aims at framing these literatures of gender in organizational studies in terms of feminist organization theories. First, the paper broader considered research on gender and leadership, career, employment, and work-life issues from a "liberal feminist" perspective. These studies are basically framed as "gender in organization" as suggested by Calás et al. (2014). The paper next illustrates a variety of studies from poststructuralist and social constructionist feminist approaches that emphasize the formation of gender in the process of organizing, in terms of the micro, meso, and macro levels. Calás et al. (2014) understood these studies as the frame of "gendering organization". Finally, this paper concludes that both directions of “gender in organization” and "gendering organization" are complementary relationships and both approaches are important for future of organizational studies. Especially in Japanese context, organization studies should pay more attention to gender and create active discussions. The paper advocates that gender issues are not a research subject specific to women, but an issue that all researchers should take into consideration.

Resent organizational and management scholars have greater attention to the studies on organizational status, regarding how it affects the performance of organizations and individuals. This paper aims to review and reorganize previous studies on organizational status and conduct research gaps that has not been fully examined in the previous studies. First, I examined the origins and historical backgrounds of the studies on organizational status. In addition, I state the definition of organizational status, regarding on the difference between organizational status and similar concepts, such as legitimacy and reputation. Second, I reorganize the function of status into three parts; signal, socio-psychological effect, expectation from audiences in society. In this part, I argue how those functions effects the behavior and performance in a certain situation. Third, I examine how dynamics of organizational status is affected by two factors: previous performance and social relationship. Finally, I examined the research gaps that has not been fully examined by looking back on the contributions and the limitations of the previous studies, and proposed the future directions of the study.

Anecdotal evidence has argued that informal and illegitimate activities hidden from organizations and managers contribute to innovation. In this review, we summarize existing research on such activities, which is called bootlegging or creative deviance, and suggest directions for future research. This research stream focuses on the following situation: though organizations give employees a certain amount of freedom to generate ideas, employees do not have the resources to demonstrate the importance and feasibility of the ideas to receive further official resource allocation. It is often naively believed that deviance fosters innovation, however, research has not been sufficiently accumulated, and it is unclear what role they will play in actual management practice. We point out three major problems and indicate the future direction: (1) assumptions regarding the subject of deviant behavior, (2) context in which the subject of deviant behavior is placed, and (3) manageability of deviant behavior or deviants. These points are considered necessary to examine the significance of deviant behavior in a more realistic context.

This study reviews the organizational aesthetics approach in organizational studies. Emerging from organizational culture studies in the 1990s, the organizational aesthetics and organizational symbolism studies took shape. Empirical aesthetics studies, in particular, have been influenced by a methodological focus on artifacts, one of the components of organizational culture. There has been considerable discussion within organizational aesthetics about the ‘pathos,’ or a recognition of feeling, emotions, mood, sense and dispositions of resources in organization life. The goals of this review include a presentation of the history of theories of organizational aesthetics by Japanese researchers, to show usefulness in organizational research, and to examine qualitative analysis methods applied to Japanese organizations.

Researchers in the field of organizational behavior (OB) would have a common understanding that OB’s identity is to study human behavior in organization. However, their studies have been criticized for neglecting organizational aspect in their research subjects. In other words, despite of the situation where there is a common view of the identity of OB research, a paradoxical situation that identity is being lost has been pointed out. Regarding this paradoxical situation, this paper reviews how this paradoxical issue of OB research has been discussed. Firstly, referring to Heath and Sitkin (2001), we discuss and identify where the aforementioned paradoxical situation lies. Secondly, considering how the existing research dealt with the situation, we show a few specific research topics that exemplify how the paradoxical problem emerges and the way researchers approach to it. Finally, given the review mentioned above, we discuss the future direction of OB research.

The theory of person–organization fit is understood as congruence between an employee’s own values and the values of an organization, asserting that the more highly fitted, the more the desirable personal attitudes and behaviors are leveraged within an organization. This is a research area regarding which many empirical studies have been published since 1990. Despite decades of research, there have only been a few studies conducted in Japan regarding the fit between individual and organizational values separately, as the unique Japanese human resource system, characterized by batch recruitment of new graduates and lifetime employment, results in highly homogeneous organizations. While research in Japan has remained stagnant, the research and discussion on person–organization fit has been actively underway including conceptual definition, measurement methods, and research models. Six main issues have emerged, including extension to various adjacent areas, theoretical explanations of misfit, understanding of the dynamic fitting process, redefinition of person–organization interaction, research design and analyses methods, and overall theorizing. This review outlines the history of research and discussions regarding person–organization fit, from its origin to the present day, and examines the meaning and potential application of this research in Japan, where diverse work styles have permeated.

Prior research has limitations, such as a lack of a comprehensive framework and systematic review. This research builds a theoretical framework based on these limitations by applying the systematically reviewed literature to the input-process-output model. This study found that experiences of four different integration processes and the circulation of the input-process-output model reinforce the knowledge integration capability. The presented findings have important implications for knowledge integration and organizational capabilities.

The aim of this paper is to question the significance of conducting research on organizational routines from the perspective of critical realism. Organizational routines have been conceptualized using a variety of definitions as analytical units for researchers to explain the behavior of business firms. However, since 2000, they have been defined as a duality of patterns and actions influenced by structuration theory, and research on routine dynamics has been developed to capture the stability and change of routines in practice. Presently, researchers are drawn to the analytical framework called “narrative networks,” which describes these dynamics based on sociological narrative methodology and flat ontology. Thus, while organizational routines have been elaborated as a descriptive model, the reasons for describing the routines have not necessarily been clarified. To bridge this gap in the literature, in this paper, I discuss this issue based on critical realism and argue that by describing the routines, researchers can objectify the tendencies that constitute the routineness of routines, and analyze those tendencies critically as well as create new practices and routines. This suggests that the narrative approach has potential as a pragmatic methodology and not just as a descriptive model.